In order to understand Film Noir, I think it's important to understand the context and what made the characters the way they were.
Early Noirs were a reflection of the era starting with the end of WWI, Prohibition/Bootlegging, The Dust Bowl, the Crash of '29 and leading up to the early years of WWII (before the US became involved). Early in this film we see Bogey talking to the new owner of his family's farm. The sub-text is that the Earle family lost the farm in the Depression and the present owner was also in deep trouble. People lost faith in the government and the American Dream. People felt abandoned and isolated; many, many of them were desperate. So in Roy Earle, we have an Indiana farm boy who clearly was "brought up right", but turned to crime out of necessity. His odd affection for "Pard" is no different from characters in other Noirs whose downfalls were the love of women who often were symbolic of faith in American values.
In later Noirs, the protagonists were often soldiers who returned to the States after WWII. Today, we'd say most of them had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They had seen such horrors that they were forced to becmme hardened in order to cope with experiencing "Man's Inhumanity to man". They also understood the ultimate doom that the atomic bomb represented - a threat unlike any the world had ever seen before.
They often seemed driven to self-defeat or self-destruction. Others were aimless wanderers who were trying to fit into a society that neither understood them nor respected their sacrifices. In the later Noir films, the women changed as well. In many cases, the "hooker with the heart of gold" was replaced by women who were just as ruthless as their men, or even more so (Jane Greer). This intensified the hero's (or villain's) alienation because now they couldn't even count on the altruistic support of the women they loved. Everybody was a potential enemy - a sort of pervading paranoia had set in.
I don't think High Sierra stands up well today purely on the strength of the story, but nonetheless, we see finely crafted performances by the brilliant Ida Lupino (brilliant in ways beyond her acting skills - check out her bio), Bogey at his best, Henry Travers in what was probably his greatest and most nuanced role, along with supporting stalwarts like Barton MacLane, Arthur O'Connell and the rest.
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michaelsrennie
16 years ago
Bogart's best film remains the criminally under-seen In a Lonely Place...you guys should also watch The Harder they Fall. Two late Bogart films that many fans miss.
And no, I dont even see how it is possible for anyone to think these films havent aged well. Movies from the '40s are different from today, of course, but this is what makes them so appealing. Nobody writes dialogue like that found in Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Big Sleep, or Lonely Place anymore.
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onepotato2
16 years ago
In order to understand Film Noir, I think it's important to understand the context and what made the characters the way they were.
Early Noirs were a reflection of the era starting with the end of WWI, (UM- NO!) Prohibition/Bootlegging, The Dust Bowl, the Crash of '29 and leading up to the early years of WWII (before the US became involved).
etc.
by - vocalistbob on Fri Dec 26 2008 08:16:04
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Read up - Noir doesn't start until 1946 with "The Maltese Falcon" or, slightly earlier, "I Wake Up Screaming."
This movie ain't Noir.
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Madluke91
16 years ago
Couldn't disagree more with a post. I don't know what makes the OP think that his films havn't aged well, but if someones films have ages well in the whole of Cinema history, for me it would a more than fair amouny of Bogarts films.
Top 5 movies:A Clockwork Orange, Goodfellas, Seven Samurai, The Dark Knight, Dead Man's Shoes.
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PillowRock
15 years ago
Noir doesn't start until 1946 with "The Maltese Falcon" or, slightly earlier, "I Wake Up Screaming."
That statement is a contradiction.
Falcon came out in 1941.
The *term* "film noir" didn't come into common usage until shortly after the War (1946 or so), because that was when the French finally go to see American films made after 1939 or 40. But the style had been evolving for some time before that. There's an awful lot of similarities to "film noir" in the "poetic realist" movement in pre-War French cinema. Some of them are almost indistinguishable from noirs (
Port of Shadows comes to mind). There were also elements that became major pieces of noir's identity in the expressionist portion of German silent cinema (and a number of those directors came to the States and continued to influance the evolution of film noir).
Selecting any single movie as being the unequivocal "first film noir" is mostly just an arbitrary boundary demarkation, so that clean chapter boundaries can be set for book authors / editors. Most of the time, styles and genres evolve more than spring up spontaneously and fully formed.
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